For the final review, I looked up a restaurant called Conflict Kitchen and looked at the design of their site. Something interesting about the restaurant is that they actually change their style and design every so often. They serve food based on countries that the U.S is in conflict with at the time, and currently they are serving Palestinian food. The layout of the restaurant site is very interesting, where scrolling is the main function of the site. On each page, the main information is at the top of the page, with an image behind, and more additional info, you scroll down, and the navigation bar is consistent through each page, and the layout is consistent where the information is laid out and crisp. The text is balanced, and images do not take away from the text. Along with the layout, the texture of the site is very visual, but interesting. The textures that are used as the main background are used throughout the site, as well as the actual restaurant. They use this as their brand, and change it based on what country they are focusing on. The texture also designates the color of the site. The colors that the Conflict Kitchen used were colors from the textural banner at the top of the site. They consistently keep purple, black, red, white, and yellow. The colors work well together, except for some white text over the pictures. Some text is hard to read, but overall the colors work great together. According to the Principles of Web Design, red symbolizes excitement and passion. Purple symbolizes royalty and power, as well as extravagance. Yellow shows energy and happiness. Black, finally, is often negative, but it can show power and strength. Overall, the colors work very nicely together. Navigation works great as well, and leads the viewer around without causing problems. The site maintains the nav bar through every page, and is clean and understandable. Overall, our website could be comparable to this through our color choices, and it would be nice to mimic the image use of this site, as well as navigation that is understandable. Our site will stand out through images and colors, as well as possible textures.
Review 2- Hartzfeld- Knock Knock
For my review of a single page website, I chose to look at Knock Knock, a company that is looking into the gas, water and electricity usage in the Netherlands. When the page is first loaded, the screen opens to a circle with orange and teal surrounding the circle, and the phrases “knock knock” and “Focus on the fun things in life” in front of a transparent blue background covering an iPad being used. Upon first sight, the site is clean, but it is a little bit distracting with the moving video behind the text. The color scheme is crisp, and the text is easy to read.
Upon scrolling down the page a bit, the web page appears to work on somewhat of a grid system, having all of the images and other elements in line with each other and spaced apart to effectively use the page. All of the scrolling is down, and new information is added the farther the page is scrolled. The website is crisp, and avoids a lot of clutter. Knock knock follows a lot of the elements such as the grid and negative space that is talked about in The Principles of Beautiful Web Design.
Knock knock sticks to the main colors of orange and blue through the whole page. Any important information is shown through the use of these colors. From The Principles of Beautiful Web Design, They talk about colors that work for websites, and give the emotional reactions to colors. Orange creates a sense of creativity and enthusiasm, which is exactly what knock knock is trying to achieve. Blue is a calming color, and promotes intelligence. When these colors are looked at together, a viewer can get a sense of contrast from warm to cold, which could be the intention of the site, since it talks about electricity and gas. Web designers for this page also use line to their advantage as they use literal lines to connect points together. The main idea of the next point is shown under this line, and scrolls into the next section. The designers also use a lot of other images to convey the ideas, but they are not distracting in the way that the video is at the very top of the page.
Overall, knock knock is an effective website, and the design works well. There are some flaws such as the opening video and some cluttered spots, but overall the web page is crisp, clear, and interesting to read through. Knock knock is designed to create a sense of imagination into the viewers, and it is effective that the viewers will think, but not have to think about how to navigate the page, but to be able to think about the material presented.